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User talk:Mr Nelg
Hey Nelg! How's the book coming? Turtle Fan 03:41, 28 October 2008 (UTC) I've started writing it but It's been coming along slowly because of work. Mr Nelg Ah, work. What doesn't that ruin. Turtle Fan 00:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC) Tanks It will not. Go right ahead. TR 15:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC) Considering that the M3 Grant/Lee during DoI had nothing to do with World War, I find it rather difficult to imagine . . . Will we also be able to write an article about the great, invincible Chi-Ha, which had Allied tankmen throughout Asia and the Pacific trembling in terror? Turtle Fan 17:10, 2 January 2009 (UTC) :The Chi-ha is listed in Worldwar. TR 17:12, 2 January 2009 (UTC) ::Surely such a world-beater deserves its own entry. Turtle Fan 18:19, 2 January 2009 (UTC) Hey Nelg! Long time no see. What's new? Turtle Fan 04:26, March 15, 2010 (UTC) :Ack! Busy! I've been bouncing back and forth between Oz and China for three months stright! Here's why. Mr Nelg ::Ah, yes. That is one of the larger stories in world trade these days. How excitin for you to be at the forefront. Turtle Fan 06:26, March 15, 2010 (UTC) Korea Game Why no, actually, I hadn't heard. . . . Turtle Fan 05:29, June 13, 2010 (UTC) :Thanks, I'll check it out. Turtle Fan 06:32, June 13, 2010 (UTC) Korean Novels I've never heard of any of them. Also, I don't remember enough Korean to use Naver anymore; I had to let Google translate it. There is one piece of Korean AH I know fairly well: a 2002 film called 2009: Lost Memories. The premise is quite intriguing: Ito Hirobumi survives An Jung-Geun's attempt on his life, and without that iconic moment to inspire their nationalist spirit, Koreans pretty much just learn to tolerate Japanese occupation. So do assorted other colonies the Japanese absorb into their empire, and they don't end up bogged down in a land war in China in the 30s. This allows them to maintain friendly relations with the Anglosphere, and they end up on the Allied side in WWII, which naturally ends with the atomic bombing of Germany. Their empire remains strong and Korea eventually becomes a thoroughly integrated part of it. The visuals of Japanized Seoul are simply stunning. Alas, the silliness of the plot sort of leads the whole thing to fall apart: In OTL 2009 a Japanese nut with a time machine went back to 1909 and stopped An from shooting Ito. Now in this alternate 2009, a Korean nationalist group, which is somehow aware that their timeline is not what it's supposed to be, use their own time machine to stop him from stopping An. Don't ask me what's to prevent another Japanese time traveller from stopping them from stopping him from stopping An, ad infinitum. Turtle Fan 00:31, January 26, 2011 (UTC) AaOP Looks like someone picked up a copy of Atlantis and Other Places. Updates on The Horse of Bronze a few days ago and now News From the Front. What'd ya think of them? ML4E 17:16, September 3, 2011 (UTC) Actually, I didn't pick it up, I found it among some of my older books, along with a copy of The Two Georges. I don't remember how I originally got it, but the book jacket's got a tear in it. As for what I think of them, I like them. It's classic Turtledove, plus they're short stories, and by that I mean they're too the point; They don't dick around. He says what has to be said, and moves on. Lately, his novels and series just go on too long and wear out their welcome with me. Mr Nelg :Among your older books? A&OP was only released last December. . . . :I didn't say it was THAT old. Just that I found it among my older books; On the book shelf. As I said, it's appearance surprised me, because I had stopped getting HT's books by then. I can't remember how I got my hands on it. I have the sneaking suspicion that it might be someone else’s. Mr Nelg ::I was tempted to buy it based solely on the fact that the spine would have looked quite attractive next to the Atlantis trilogy in my book case; when the first two books were yellow and blue, I'd really had my heart set on the third being red. I was interested to see what new short stories HT would put in it and I was especially hoping there'd be a new Atlantis story. But then as time wound down to the release date we got news of more and more reprints being included and finally we had a whole book's worth without one page of new fiction. I was so put off by the laziness and obvious attempt to make a quick buck while exerting minimal effort that I permanently crossed it off my wish list. Then a couple weeks after it dropped, my largest bookcase, clearly far flimsier and cheaper than it had appeared, collapsed under the weight of the books I'd had on it, so display purposes would have been in vain. I'm yet to replace the bookcase, and I don't think I will. As I shifted things around to put as many books as possible on shelves in smaller cases, and removed forgettable books on those shelves to make room for favorites from the lost bookcase, I eventually came to appreciate the need to ration shelf space. Now if a book wants a spot in a bookcase it has to earn it by being an exceptional book, which has improved the average quality of my collection and has finally curbed my once-inveterate vice of buying books far more quickly than I could hope to read them, pissing away money and aggravating the storage issue. But I digress. ::Of course, ten of the twelve shorts would have been new to me: I'd only actually read HoB and SIStGTRotG. One was pretty enjoyable, the other made me gag. I did read the two Atlantis shorts for the first time in a few sittings at a B&N cafe, perusing the book with no intention of buying it. It was a fitting farewell to a series that I really had come to enjoy quite a lot in the previous few winters, especially AiA which, though it was actually the first work written in the universe, had a wistful, "I'll-never-pass-this-way-again" motif that turned out to be a perfect fit for my purposes. ::I knocked off "The Genetics Lecture" for good measure on one of those because it's so short it felt criminal not to. It inspired me to read The Call of Cthulhu; I'd never read Lovecraft before. I intended to read the Catcher in the Rye one in the same manner but the bookstore apparently sold all its A&OP copies and didn't restock them. The rest, "Bedfellows" and "News From the Front" and "Uncle Alf" and whatever else was in there, are stories I'd never read, but the information on each on this Wiki is thorough enough that I consider myself passably familiar, and from what I do know of each of them, there's nothing that's grabbed me and left me with a strong desire to go through them myself. Turtle Fan 04:19, September 5, 2011 (UTC) :Have to disagree on length. I like the longer short stories like the Tor.com ones and the one in Stirling's new anthology. The Atlantis shorts are quite long too. They have room to develop and thus to tell stories of some complexity. The twenty-page jobs of the old days never really did it for me; they never had time to go anywhere. :I think that to me, it just comes across as short, considering the way HT drones on lately. "The Horse of Bronze" and "Uncle Alf" are quite long, and I'll confess, Uncle Alf is boring the shit out of me. "Bedfellows" was quirky, but boring. I suppose I liked the HOB because the whole idea fascinated me. I suppose my mind is really turning back to the likes of "Kaleidoscope" and "Departures." Mr Nelg ::I disliked both the earlier anthologies you name, perhaps because the stories were so short. "Here's one half-baked fifteen-pager after another!" It actually had me swearing off short stories altogether for a while there; well, it along with a few similarly unsatisfying anthologies I read within a relatively short period. ::Departures was doubly disappointing because the cover had me believing that the POV character of each story would be pulled out of time and the final story would be them all coming together in some weird sci fi nether region for a bizarre adventure whose type I could not guess. Really a pretty stupid idea, now that I thinkon it, but that beautiful cover did set my imagination off subconsciously. We all know what happens when one judges a book by its cover, of course. :::I quite enjoyed most of the stories in Departures but I wasn't mislead by the cover, I knew it was a collection of independent short stories. ML4E 21:35, September 7, 2011 (UTC) ::I read HoB in The First Heroes, by the way. I read almost all the stories in that one; somewhere about four-fifths in, something convinced me to skip ahead to the Trojan War story (only one Trojan War story in that book??) and declare victory. I enjoyed HoB quite a lot but there were others in that collection that were more enjoyable still. Turtle Fan 04:19, September 5, 2011 (UTC) :Look forward to hearing your reaction to "Someone Is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy." That's a real gem, you know. Turtle Fan 01:33, September 5, 2011 (UTC) :Okay, I'll start that one next. Mr Nelg ::Uh-oh: In my mind the words I wrote were dripping sarcasm. I see now that that did not come across here. My recommendation is not meant literally. If you read it we can commisserate on it. Turtle Fan 04:19, September 5, 2011 (UTC) Ah well, as may be --- I see I was correct in assuming you had started reading AaOP. I did enjoy HoB. It put me to mind Between the Rivers in that its premise is that mythical creatures and gods existed in pre-recorded time. I didn't care for Uncle Alf (although I didn't hate it) and read "News" in Counting Up, Counting Down so didn't re-read it. "The Genetics Lecture" was an amusing short-short, while "Throne Rooms" tries too hard. On the other hand, if you ever read any of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman stories, you can amuse yourself picking up references in style and general theme. ML4E 21:32, September 7, 2011 (UTC) Fallout 3 reference Yes, although I have no idea where. Maybe Harry Turtledove's individual page? TR 20:54, January 2, 2012 (UTC) Creating a forum to discuss the matter. TR 16:20, January 3, 2012 (UTC)